As Clinton Pushes Pakistan for Haqqani Offensive, It Fights Lashkar Group

By Anwar Shakir and James Rupert -
Oct 21, 2011

Thousands of Pakistani villagers
fled their homes outside the country’s northwestern provincial
capital Peshawar today as troops advanced to attack a militant
group that has disrupted the main trade route to Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s army is escalating its fight in the Khyber
tribal district as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, visiting
the capital, Islamabad, is demanding a new campaign against a
separate Taliban faction, the Haqqani group, headquartered 165
kilometers (100 miles) to the southwest in the North Waziristan
district. U.S. officials say that Haqqani, a main Taliban
faction fighting U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, is backed by at
least some elements of the Pakistani military and its
intelligence service.

Families from Malik Din Khel and Sipah fled in cars and on
foot, some driving herds of goats ahead of them, after officials
warned of the impending attack, local resident Niaz Ali Khan
said by phone. A day earlier, local guerrillas ambushed troops
from the army’s paramilitary Frontier Corps yesterday,
triggering a battle in which 34 militants and three soldiers
died. The villages, which officials say have about 3,000
residents, are 8 kilometers (5 miles) southwest of Peshawar.

The fighting is the latest eruption of a seven-year-old
rebellion led by a local man, Mangal Bagh, whose Lashkar-e-Islam
guerrillas are loosely allied with Pakistan’s Taliban movement.
Bagh’s fighters have threatened security in Peshawar and have
attacked NATO supply convoys on the highway from the city to the
Khyber Pass border crossing, the main overland trade route to
Afghanistan.

‘Enemy Number One’

The U.S. wants Pakistan to end its long alliance with the
Haqqanis, even though the Pakistani army is reluctant to lose
them as a proxy force in Afghanistan according to analysts
including Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid.

“Enemy number one is Haqqani,” said Major General Daniel
Allyn, the top U.S. commander in eastern Afghanistan, in an
August interview with the Long War Journal, a U.S.-based
monitoring group on the war.

The risk that violence may spread from Khyber district to
Peshawar, the capital of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province and
Pakistan’s eighth-largest city, may make Bagh a higher priority
than the Haqqanis for the Pakistani army. It has acted quickly
in the past to counter such a threat.

Protection Money

In 2008, when Bagh’s men made incursions into Peshawar, the
military launched an offensive and blew up his home. In 2009,
thousands of troops forcibly closed the Khyber district’s Bara
Market, a bazaar of about 10,000 shops and warehouses just west
of Peshawar, because much of its commerce was in goods and drugs
smuggled from Afghanistan, said Tariq Hayat Khan, the chief
security officer for Khyber, Waziristan and the five other
ethnic Pashtun tribal districts that form a semi-autonomous zone
along Pakistan’s Afghan border.

“The shopkeepers and workshop owners paid millions of
rupees,” or tens of thousands of dollars, “each month in
protection money to the militants and to criminal
organizations,” Khan said in an interview last week.

Bara’s closure has exacerbated unemployment in the border
zone, called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where only
20 percent of men are employed fulltime, according to a 2010
survey sponsored by a Washington research group, the New America
Foundation. The lack of jobs has helped fuel the region’s
militant insurgencies, Khan and analysts say.